Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

20.4. THE NECESSITY 89
• The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum
mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will
not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our
doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must
eliminate to open up the road.
20.4 The Necessity
In his textbook Atomic Physics Born describes the physics problem demanding
a solution:
• Classical electrodynamics and mechanics absolutely fail to account for
the processes of absorption and emission of radiation.
20.5 The Execution
After this preparation as necessity, Born proceeds to kill determinism and
causality by the axe of probability:
• The wave-particle dualism compels us to abandon any attempt to set up
a deterministic theory.
• In reply to the question whether a law a causation still holds good in
the new theory, two standpoints are possible:
• Either we may look upon processes from the pictorial side, holding fast
to the wave-particle picture – in this case the law of causality certainly
ceases to hold.
• Or (with the square of the modulus of the wave function as deterministically
determined probability), the initial value of the wave function
is not completely definable. This view of the matter is equivalent to the
assertion that events happen indeed in a strictly casual way, but that
we do not know the initial value exactly.
• In this sense the law of causality is therefore empty; physics is in the
nature of the case-indeterminate, and therefore the affair of statistics.